Image Hosting on Reddit
reddit.com
reddit.com
Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.
As an aside: if you're looking for an amusing read, the "IgnorantImgur" subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur's origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.
reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps.
This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.
If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.
s/reddit/somethingawful
This is cyclical, an image site gains critical mass, builds in size and then buckles under the weight of providing a free, clean, high-bandwidth service.
How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur?
It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.
The changes came when imgur took VC money.
How much is that additional 2Gbps of traffic (to Comcast) worth?
I could imagine that imgur traffic paid for itself.
That doesn't really make sense, as others have pointed out.
Imgur was indeed a valued customer, and we grew together and had a great relationship with them.
Customers like them helped us achieve the necessary scale to build out our network.
But pushing more bits costs more, not less ;)
though not as often today as in times past, there are points where 10Gbps is more expensive overall than 20 or 30Gbps.
Getting high traffic customers like Imgur allowed us to negotiate better commits, establish new peering and interconnection agreements, and otherwise lower the "unit costs" of the network we built.
It was generally never worth it to do this for free, but you're spot on that in certain cases it was worth it to do it for less than (current) per unit costs.
Ended up with KeyCDN for now
We really need a better way to pay the people who create and serve the content we all love to consume.
Hosting images is a high cost service that most people don't want to pay for, so there's very little ways to make money.
> I posted it on Reddit, Digg, and a couple forums that I frequent at the same time.
Imgur was never a reddit exclusive thing. It was just mentioned to advertise and gain loyalty from reddit users.
Which, honestly isn't a bad thing if he did.
He made a second Reddit post the next day.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu...
Notably, when that post was submitted to Reddit, it got eviscerated, nothing that "hey, they provide a service for free, they deserve ad revenue!"
However, GIFs completely upended that calculation by increasing the average file size by an order of magnitude and pushed the viability of a cruft free image host further down the road by another few years.
Frankly, I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur and absorbed it under youtube or something. Being the default place on the web to host images seems like something way more strategically valuable to Google than any standalone image host.
Imgur is just a commodity. Youtube is not.
Yes, Google can create a infinite scalable image hosting overnight, but creating a community is a lot harder.
So, sure, anyway halfway competent developer could bang out a YouTube (or Facebook, etc) prototype in a few weeks, but going from there to a reliable, usable service at scale is something else altogether.
You're going to need some project managers, SREs, sysadmins, front and back end web developers, programmers who know about video encoding, content experts, lawyers, etc...
So not at all unless you change what having a monopoly is.
Also, google has now had success building photo sites / photo products, but at the time of the youtube purchase, hadn't had much success building a video product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
Even if you throw in some machine learning to figure out if the user's looking at memes or gifs or porn, I can't imagine the marginal value of that data being of use to Google. It's essentially unmonetizable, which is why most image hosts disappear after a few years.
Imgur was successful in avoiding that fate by pivoting to a community, but that community would be of no use to someone like Google.
<script type="text/javascript">
Imgur.Util.getGoogleTracker();
__ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>◔̯◔
Is PBase free?
No.Video hosting + community is a commodity.
Image hosting + community is a commodity.
Non-monopoly is a commodity.
Just scroll down on this page: http://imgur.com/gallery/tWWxi4D
Voting options, and lots and lots of comments.
The whole point of this discussion thread is that Imgur is f*ed because they aren't independent enough. Otherwise there's nothing to worry about, right?
Youtube isn't a commodity. It's the place that even your aunt, mother, grandmother, uncle will visit and knows to visit for entertainment or music. People who would never have a reason to visit imgur.
I wanna see the entire game 7 of the nba finals online. Show me where besides YouTube.
I wanna see the Red Wedding scene again. Show me where besides YouTube.
I wanna find a quick entertaining video to show my kid. Show me where besides YouTube.
I wanna find a compilation of the longest homeruns in baseball history. Show me where besides YouTube.
Heck most people try to ignore YouTube comments. It's not really a community at all. The actual content is the value prop.
They did make their own version of youtube at one point, apparently it wasn't enough and they wanted the userbase too.
"The acquisition of the privately held YouTube will enable Google to thrive in one area of the Internet where it has so far failed to gain footing. According to Hitwise, which monitors Web traffic, [YouTube] has the lion's share of online video traffic (...) a 46 percent share, MySpace has 23 percent and Google Video has 10 percent."
Meanwhile, this 2006 article from the Economist [2] stated:
"the deal is 'an aggressive, mature move for Google, one that shows that senior management is not too proud or stubborn to see that they can't build everything themselves,' says Henry Blodget, an analyst at Cherry Hill Research. Indeed, Google's Mr Schmidt freely conceded that YouTube is the 'clear winner', especially in creating social networks around its site."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html
Summary: userbase/community was what drove the network effect, which made it impossible for Google to catch up, and that's why Google made the decision to purchase Youtube.
Google had very much the power of building a YouTube-like community themselves, but buying out a competitor is a short-cut since it has the positive side-effect of removing that competition in our business. After buying YouTube, Google didn't have to waste time in building a community around a new product or "converting" the YouTube masses to theirs.
This short-cut way of acquisition is nowadays preferred by large companies rather than risk everything by doing innovation and "real" competition.
No kidding. The whole front page is all animated GIFs (or .gifv/mp4/whatever
As it is:
1. I hate gifs (with very few exceptions).
2. I lack a decent place to host images associated with Reddit.
3. Subscription-based services are a risk on several fronts.
Sex. Corporations tend to keep faaar away from everything related to porn, and a fair share of imgur images is nsfw content. Cleaning it up would be more trouble than it's worth.
Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr and many bids for SnapChat seem to be evidence to the contrary. Cable companies and premium channels also make a lot off of porn.
Porn is fine for large companies as long as they have some cover (the product isn't just porn).
It is by many considered better than purpose built porn search sites, such as pornmd.
As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.
(I'm pretty sure the way it works is: it shows the image for certain referrers, and when you load the "full" page it requests the image with a referrer of imgur. That way you get the image, and then subsequent requests to the image are served from your browser cache so the direct links work)
Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.
... aaaaand now I want to make a malicious image host that always shows you your uploaded images but serves up goatse to anyone you link it to. Or maybe just flips the images, upsidedownternet style.
But I have some scalable plans if it were to take off without breaking the bank.
EDIT: The server was moved off of shared hosting after about 4 hours of release. It's now on a dedicated server with a 100mb port.
EDIT2: This is an old post and it's no longer on just one 1 dedicated server. It's on many, and utilizes a CDN provided by Voxel.
This was the original post [0] announcing the creation of imgur 7 years ago. Maybe in 7 years from now you have your own img42 image hosting emporium! :)
---
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
I have been hosting img42 off a $5 a mo/ droplet :P. It has served XXm+ impressions, and 1m uploads since its creation. I also have been sustaining a ~3m a day DDOS from Russia for about a year now.
It was actually that drawback that lead me to making/using my own image host! With my own host, files that were uploaded back in 2012 when it first started working are still there - with the same URL (despite URL scheme changing since then)
EDIT: It's actually worse if you read their wiki [1]. They were profitable enough early on to have 10 employees AND move to San Francisco, going as far to win a "best bootstrapped start-up award". THEN they took 40 million in funding.
It's a reinforcement of how important setting expectations with customers early is very important to avoid stepping on their toes later on.
Reddit gave Imgur an almost impossibly wide berth compared to other "made for Reddit" sites and allowed the owner to get away with all kinds of site policy violations. Imgur also set up various restrictions on content that were conveniently waived for Reddit images.
It turns out it was because Reddit took an investment stake in the service and didn't make it known for a long while.
Then Imgur decided to just become Reddit because, hey after all, they're responsible for some huge percentage of all traffic for the site -- this being entirely contrary to the communication the site put out about what they were and were going to be doing.
Now Reddit is just wholesale replacing it with an internal service -- which is what should have happened in the first place. It's been obvious for years that this should have been a core service, but the terrible previous management of the place had pretty much frozen all improvements to the site.
I think this move speaks more to the sane new management team doing the correct things than anything else. I'm really happy with the job that Steve Huffman et al are doing with the site, the decisions seem reasonable, well intentioned and generally in a good direction.
[–]iBeReese 1246 points 3 hours ago Is there a planned retention policy? Or is it an "as long as reddit has the money to maintain the servers the images will stay forever" kind of deal?
[–]Amg137[S,A] 1421 points 3 hours ago We will keep the images as long as they are associated to a post. However if you delete a post we will also delete the image
[–]speedofdark8 1007 points 3 hours ago How are reposts handled? If i upload something into /r/aww, get the link for that post's image, submit that link to /r/cats, then delete the /r/aww post, will the link in /r/cats still work?
[–]oldschoolred[A] 795 points 3 hours ago No it wont... once the uploader removes the original post the link to that image will break
Just because someone else links to a picture doesn't mean that they get to say whether it's taken down or not...
If you want to be the "uploader" then upload it, don't just link.
Heck, I can see a similar situation where post 1 is on a subreddit with awkwardly enforced rules, post 2 is on a more relaxed one, and then because the mods remove the post and image on subreddit 1, the second version breaks with it.
Should people have to keep reuploading the same image every time they want to use it?
Access to the Reddit image host was formerly app-only. When the partial rollout occurred on test subreddits (including defaults like /r/pics), the number of submissions from the Reddit Image Host doubled. However, the market share of Imgur submissions remained unchanged, and in the weeks since then, the market share of both services has not changed at all: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f73AWzKsYrK7vFdJ3yJN...
It will be interesting to see how the full rollout affects Reddit globally, particular as Imgur's redirects are becoming non-user-friendly.
It has been a month since then.
Those official apps have lots of downloads, but don't be fooled: I bet most people downloaded them because of the free three months of reddit gold you got when you logged into them.
One postulated reason is that browser plugin Reddit Enhancement Suite doesn't work as well with Reddit images as Imgur ones. But I wouldn't be surprised if something more subtle was also at work.
I know you're doing some work around this and it will be interesting to see wider results in a few months.
Imagine you're building the perfect internet indexer. In an effort to generalize your model, you anticipate a scenario where a nofollow link shows up consistently on various Wikipedia pages where it persists for a long time. What are you going to do? Ignore the link because, sorry, them's the rules?
Or are you going to realize that nofollow is about as useful of a signal as <meta name="keywords">?
Granted, I never worked in SEO directly.
I'm still not sure what the truth is. You raise a good point.
Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to either let people help fill a gaping hole in Google's tech at the time or for the smart marketing move of making people fixate on their magic attribute. Both under the guise that spammers would care.[1]
It's been twelve years.
The SEO advice industry and Matt Cutts' blog these days are probably like when I try to ponder why my cat scoots its waterdish around the room before it drinks: attempting to find backsplanations for the idiosyncrasies of a neural network that nobody quite understands.
[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.mx/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
That said, Google probably has some heuristic for considering them. It probably errs on the side of ignoring, but it would be stupid for Google to ignore all nofollow links. Even more so because spammers don't like them.
My anecdata concludes exactly the same.
A link is a link. Sure Google acknowledges that a link is nofollow but it's not going to ignore references from a giant of the web like Wikipedia just because it adds nofollow.
Not to be taken lightly in light of all the mod craziness during the Orlando shootings and related posts.
You say that like that isn't exactly what has happened with all image hosts so far.
What history has taught us from these incidents, is that when old memes and similar posts go missing, the world wide web as a whole seems to cope just fine.
Imgur and other small sites, mostly because they don't have much profit, don't suffer a lot from copyright takedowns. I think reddit won't have the same treatment, and Imgur will still be a viable long-term solution.
And it only took a year!
All community/social changes aside, the site has gotten worse from a usability perspective as they increased their headcount.
This is the most predictable pattern in our industry.
(And yes, I realize the inherent irony in pointing that out here as well.)
https://i.imgur.com/ZwRMtJC.png
Maybe it's your ad blocker?